Chris here i'm back in my usual studio setup and my first video for the year back in spain these
two so xiaomi's new flagship series i've got the Xiaomi 12 and the 12 pro very similar flagships
but there are some key differences that you definitely need to know about make sure you
stick around for the thermal throttling test to see if both of these phones are going to be able
to withstand 20 minutes of intense 3d workloads without throttling or even crashing or overheating
i'm going to do some benchmark comparisons as well as just the screens in general
and then a camera comparison too to see the difference between the two main 50 megapixel
cameras and is there other differences as well that could pop up all in this video stay tuned
so first i wanted to mention just a couple of similarities with these that both of my models
here have 128 gigabytes of ufs 3.1 storage and both eight gigabytes of ram so it's a very fair
comparison here with some of the tests i'll be doing because they have the same ram and
then the storage size is exactly the same other similarities is two 32 megapixel cameras at the
front well they have one each of course but two in total there there's exactly the same hardware
okay and then the similarities in the build the design they have harman kardon speakers top and
bottom we'll have a listen to those later on the thickness of them is very similar just over about
8.2 but then we have the size difference of course with this one being a little bit smaller which i
really do like so in hand i do like the xiaomi 12 because it is just the 6.28 inches versus
then the 6.73 which is slightly larger so those that want a compact flagship you've got it now
with the xiaomi 12 finding a slightly smaller size and yeah i know compact it's not super compact but
look at the difference it is quite noticeably smaller right there so very good build quality
on both of these they both have gorilla glass vectus okay so that's the latest from them and
i like the materials like especially the xiaomi 12 private god here in this black color really nice
like look at it here in a bit of sunlight that it sparkles even the finish to it you can probably
see it now too as i move it around but i like the matte coating the matte glass on the back of
this it looks a little bit well toned down really the style of this now and the appearance compared
to say that some of their other phones and i do like the look of them i think both of them look
great stunning looking flagships and just the fact that they don't pick up any fingerprints in
hand feel really good so we've got easy access to both the volume and the power up and down button
sorry the volume up and down power button there on the right of both of these and just as mentioned
before that this one the xiaomi 12 like it's really comfortable to use the size is great really
do like it so there's a difference in the displays and i'll get into that shortly but one other thing
i wanted to point out to the similarities with these is we'll take a look look here at
the port so down the bottom we've got two type c ports and yes no i mean yes they haven't done it
and that is why we got no video out still i can't believe this i thought finally xiaomi would get up
with the times and give us video out on the type c ports but no not happening so they both housed
two nano sims okay both 5g and both missing lt band 20. at least this import version so
wait for the global version if you do need that of course you can see the antenna lines really
nice middle frame around the outside of both of these the harman kardon speakers top and bottom
do have another microphone two microphones there two ir transmitters and receivers which is good
if you needed that and just an exceptional build typical xiaomi now their build quality has been
really good for some time so that's great you can see the cameras do protrude a little bit
a little more there on in fact it sticks out a little bit more that bump
slightly on the xiaomi 12 there now weight wise we're looking at approximately 180 grams
versus then just over 200 about 205 so of course a weight difference the size difference
and it really matters on the screen tech being this one slightly better
that's qhd plus versus then full hd plus and let's take a look at those displays now in detail
now both of these have a refresh rate top refresh rate that is of 120 hertz touch response on both
is excellent and then we do have a difference with the screen resolutions the fact that we've got
a quad hd here all right qhd plus then just the hd plus as i mentioned now really you cannot see that
difference i've got this set here to be in 1440p and this of course 1080p and really when you look
at it in normal distances you can't see now if you look a little closer you see okay yeah yeah okay
the 12 pro is a little bit sharper there so we've got oled billion colors this can
pump out about a thousand nits and then of course we've got the ltpo amoled right here which is a
billion colors again these are excellent screens they are top flagship screens curvature to both
of them okay so you can see the color shifts out a little bit on the edges there but not really too
much of a problem i do prefer flat screens but i can see why they go with the slight curve because
when you hold the phones having the curve on the back of the glass here and then the back here
does mean that in hand yes it feels just a little bit more comfortable so when you get onto these
screens here they really do do look very similar the only difference i see is indirect sunlight
so this here even though it's got a ton of banding coming through this is the xiaomi 12 pro
and in direct sunlight it does actually look clearer it can pump out a peak brightness uh
if the conditions permit of about 1500 nets now i'm not able to actually measure that
i've only been able to get just over a thousand on both of them but you can see there's a difference
now when we take a look here at the smaller xiaomi 12 in direct sunlight that it is noticeably dimmer
so if you use your phone in direct sunlight a lot i would go then for the 12 pro model now when you
take a look at just some real world images you're not going to see at least with my recording here
any kind of difference really but you'll probably see a little bit more flickering coming through
on this xiaomi 12 pro which is on the right of the screen there there's some banding coming
through and trust me it's just on camera i don't actually see it in person so really good screens
both of them stunners but we've kind of reached that level that compared to last gen screens
they are really kind of the same our screens aren't really improving that much and really
they've reached kind of the peak there haven't they so they both run me ui 13 this is my first
experience with the new ui that's come out they knew a version where they promised to fix bugs and
have it just a lot more smoother more stable than compared to what we've had of miui 12. however i
can report sadly that i'm still sometimes seeing a few little animation lags seconds of it not even
that milliseconds it's just a split second you may see it what i've noticed a couple of times
on the xiaomi 12 pro is that when you swipe down that there could be a little bit of a
pause there and one time i've gone back into home triggering the gestures there was even
a little like loading icon there before all my icons all popped up now of course you can enable
it to be just all-in-one like before with the launcher so you've got widgets and your
applications all together or you can have an apps draw which i currently have enabled which i do
prefer i just that's the way i like things anyways everyone's different of course
so performance wise i'd say that they're both in general world use super fast phones you can see
right now what's happened is this 10 here means 10 hertz so it's dropped down the refresh rate
as soon as you touch it it goes up to 120 and you don't see this change at all which is great
now there's another setting i wanted to point out here just very quickly on the topic still
of really those displays then if you jump in here to us straight away we do have anti-flicker mode
which is great to have with this xiaomi 12 but the 12 pro has it hidden away in developer options if
you do want it and you'll still maybe see some of that banding now you can override the display
resolutions with this one of course this one here is just the full hd so we don't get that option
and with the pro we do get this which is 90 hertz i've been asking for this for a long time from
xiaomi finally we've got it so we've got that in between refresh rate between fluidity and battery
saving so really good to have so work i won't go too much in depth here with the uis but there's
still a lot of work i think xiaomi has to do with improving things with the ui and hopefully in the
global version when it finally comes out we're going to see that so charge times on both of these
very very good anything that's under an hour for me is excellent so there's a difference of only
100 milliamp hours in battery capacity between these so the battery life on both of them is very
similar in fact it's going to be worse on this one due to the larger screen and the high resolution
of course makes sense anyway 21 minutes to fully charge at 120 watts versus 38 minutes at 67 watts
both are good but if you need the faster phone the charging time that is then you go for the 12
pro so i don't have 4g with this there's no lte band 20 for me here where i'm located in spain i
need that that means i don't have it i'm stuck on 3g however i managed to pick up in town 5g
at least that supports the local 5g bands not good speeds but that is another story that's my
network provider okay and two two everyone goes on about antutu we're reaching almost the million
point mark here which is amazing it's a step up of about a hundred and sixty thousand compared to
the snapdragon triple eight the snapdragon gen one that it is the eight gen one so not a huge
difference really when you look at the cpu the cpu scores um well it's not you know that's nothing
not an and big enough reason to upgrade gpu wise is it a big enough reason well so far i would say
no testing these out when you game you can't tell that difference in points and one of these might
throttle a little bit more than the other bringing them down to almost similar kind of performance
there so anyway i have run here another test which is wildlife and you can see similar scores
but the smaller phone got a slightly higher score there and again there's a there's a pretty good
actual scores here because it's a short burst test there that's why it is so good now the internal
storage speeds both ufs 3.1 both excellent i mean look at these speeds here they are just
super fast slightly faster sequential reads here but really nothing in it these are probably faster
than most people's laptops out there unless you're running a really fast pci e3 spec drive in them
and then we have a geekbench 5 score nothing in it very similar only 100 points more the smaller
phone again scoring slightly better here for some reason even though they've got the same ram and
the same chipset it must be a difference in just the firmware that's causing that there i would say
and then gps on both of them works very well here with that new snapdragon 8 gen 1. works excellent
that was even indoors here i'm able to lock on and get the accuracy cap there of three meters
stress test time so using 3d marks wild live extreme stress test it runs for 20 minutes
i'm going to test out here the xiaomi 11 ultra we've got the xiaomi 12 pro the xiaomi 12
and then the iphone 13 pro max i'm going to hit start and we'll see which one's going to throttle
the most here and what kind of difference in performance drop compared to the previous
generation snapdragon triple 8 versus now of course the eight gen one so i don't have four
fingers that i can press this all at the same time so they're just gonna be run like this
it won't matter and i'll let that run now for 20 minutes and we'll see the results and see if any
one of these is going to also crash if it gets too hot hopefully not there we go the xiaomi 12
just dropped out overheating it completely kicked me out of 3d mark that is terrible but the xiaomi
12 pro is still going at least and there we go the xiaomi 12 pro has dropped out about the 18 minute
mark so it could not complete this 20 minute stress test really disappointing to see that
these new gen snapdragon 8 gen 1s are even hotter than the snapdragon triple 8 so far at least in my
testing and there we go 20 minutes mark is up and we can see that it's throttled down to 89 percent
the me 11 ultra and then the iphone 13 pro max throttled down to 74 but even though it
throttled a lot more it still got a much higher score really disappointed in these two here so
that new snapdragon 8 gen 1 it seems to be even hotter than the snapdragon triple 8 which is
already a hot chip so if you've got a snapdragon 865 or the 870 you're still good you're still good
in 2022 such a disappointment here from these two dropping out completely failing this test
now for a bit of a camera comparison i start out with the video here so we've got 32 megapixel
sensors on the xiaomi 12 and then the 12 pro they're using the exact same sensor as far as i
know there's no difference in them at all here and we just get 1080p so that's what we're able to
record with a 1080p 30 and 60 and it tends to you can see now look differently over exposed compared
to what i'm showing you with the pixel so the pixel 6 pro here capturing this much better i mean
look at the side of my face here now on the two xiaomi's i find just it's overexposed here they
really do need to optimize these cameras you can see between the xiaomi 12 pro and the xiaomi 12
with their 50 megapixel sensors uh there isn't really too much of a difference here
with video performance that is but the imx 707 is a newer sensor that's in the xiaomi 12 pro
so we've got electronic and optical image stabilization then with our stills the pixel 6 pro
it's hard to beat here but i do like the colors we get from the xiaomi 12 pro the stitching's okay
there but i do think more works needed with the tweaking of just the optimization of these cameras
so this one very close between the xiaomi 12 and the 12 pro the colors look pretty good my
cat vera here you can see the xiaomi 12 i think looks good but it kind of killed the blacks there
but then the 12 pro and even the pixel 6 kind of over did the contrast there ultra wide cameras
so not much of a difference between the xiaomi 12 and the 12 pro the pixel 6 there got the colors
more spot on xiaomi 12 tended to be a little bit too bluish in the white balance with that
particular photo there but really there's no real difference between them as you can see here
hard to tell the difference apart from the wider field of view we do get with the xiaomi 12 pro's
ultra wide that 50 megapixel camera it does capture tiny little bit more detail too as well
but still a decent ultra wide now main camera here in low light there is a difference here so
this is where the xiaomi 12 pro does tend to pull ahead and looks a bit better sharper
captures more light and it is the more expensive sensor the front-facing cameras
both exactly the same basically there it is the same 32 megapixel sensor so no surprise so then
which one of these two should you get well my pick would definitely be go for the largest xiaomi 12
pro because you get slightly better cameras but not a huge difference especially in daylight or
in video with the main cameras you can't really tell the difference there and then the ultra wide
slightly better screen faster charging times but that isn't the key reason the real reason is for
me is the throttling so this one after about the 12 minute mark in the 20 minute stress test just
crashed out crashed and burned you could say and then on the 19 minute mark that is when the xiaomi
12 pro failed as well so very disappointing to see that qualcomm's new chip the next gen 1 the
snapdragon 8 gen 1 is in fact pretty much just like the snapdragon triple 8 simply too hot so if
your phone currently has a snapdragon 870 or the 865 i wouldn't really honestly bother upgrading
for the chipset alone unless you gain other things like charging speeds better cameras or
better screen that are important to you but these new gem phones if this is what they're all about
so far a little bit disappointing so we'll be having a full review coming out for both of these
ones individual videos that'll cover the battery life but it's looking a little disappointing
still in my testing with these two really i feel that the xiaomi 12 series so far initially
first impressions really here that uh they're not really too much of a step up at all from
the xiaomi 11 series so if you do have the may 11 well why earth would you really upgrade what
are you gaining well so far not a lot at all so thank you so much for watching this review do stay
tuned subscribe i have plenty more videos coming out so i hope to see you in those bye for now